DeathStalker said:
Exactly. This was a BOUGHT not a BUILT rig. It came prepackaged. for $99 bucks I doubled my RAM. The next step up in CPU was $300 for the 7700 instead of the 6700 and THAT wasn't worth it. Any GPU I can get for $99 I don't want to buy. It will actually diminish the set up.
Yeah, $99 bucks certainly not a big investment, so I understand why you would do it. I too agree, I would not have spent $300 more to go from the Intel 6700 to the 7700. Especially considering the price difference is only $35 at NewEgg. $349 versus $315.

And I wasn't saying buy a $99 video card. I meant, if it came down to a $400 video card, or a $499 video card you would likely get more bang for the buck putting an additional $99 into the video card.
DeathStalker said:
And do you want to know something? When I built the now dead rig with 8G of RAM everyone said I was crazy no one would EVER use that much......... and it STILL lagged on Crysis at max settings. (Of course the NSA super computer lagged out playing Crysis back then).
Yeah, I think it was more a matter of Crysis being poorly written. Nothing could run that game maxed out. But I remember the endless chatter about this being "the" benchmark for any build.

DeathStalker said:
you can never have too much RAM anymore than you have have too fast a computer. Wait til you see what I build when I finish this remodel lol.
See, I would disagree with you here. You "can" spend crazy money and get the absolute top of the line made today. But in 5 years, that top of the line is going to be nearly the same as 2-3 steps down from top of the line compared to what is going to be out. Both would be very ancient.

My previous build was in 2009 and I bought a Core 2 Quad Q9550 and overclocked it from 2.83Ghz to 3.40Ghz. Top of the line back then was a Core i7-965 Extreme Edition which was about $1,000. My CPU was around $300. But today a Core i3-4170 outruns both of them. A Core i3!!!!!!!. So, had I splurged and went $1,000 for the CPU instead of $300 for the CPU, here in 2016, both are outperformed by a $115 Core i3.

Everybody has different priorities. For me personally, I would rather buy a $1500 computer today, and a $1,500 computer in 3 years, and another $1,500 computer 3 years after that, then spend $4,500 on a computer today. Things change so rapidly that you will want new things that don't even exist today. Like USB4, or DDR6, PCI-Express V2. So my mindset is always to buy something decent and solid, but never at the top of pile. Then, in a few years, get something new, hand the old computer down to your kids, or another family member, or use it as a test box, whatever.

So, don't take my post the wrong way. I'm not trying to say you are doing anything wrong. I just have a different line of thinking.

Personally I think your $1599 box from Microcenter seems like a really sweet deal and a good sweet spot. For Christmas, i built my 9 year old a box and spent right around $1400 including a 24" Dell Ultrasharp monitor, a mechanical keyboard and a gaming mouse. It was a Core i5-6500, 16GB of DDR4, a 512GB PCI-Express SSD, 2TB 7,200 RPM drive, a Gigabyte GA-z170x-UD3 mobo with an EVGA 1060 FTW+ video card. For the games he plays and what he does, it's a great box. It runs fabulously cool, was $125 less than a Core i7-6700 (at the time I bought the parts).